Media Stop
Things Get Added to Your Medical Record. Almost Nothing Comes Off.
Think about how your medical chart actually gets built.
You see a doctor for something. It gets written down. You see a different doctor two years later for something unrelated, and the first thing goes on a list at the top of your file. That list keeps growing. Every visit adds. Practically nothing gets removed.
Nobody designed it that way on purpose. Adding a condition takes a second and is obviously the safe thing to do. Removing one means deciding it is genuinely over, which takes time nobody has, and carries a small risk of being wrong. So the list just accumulates, year after year, and starts describing a version of you that stopped being accurate a while ago.
There is now a number on how often this happens
A US federal audit published in May 2026 examined 97 patient records where an insurer had billed for an acute stroke. Every one failed review.
Sixty-eight of those patients had genuinely had a stroke. It was in their records, documented and real. The record just described it as something happening now rather than something that happened years ago.
That is not fraud. That is a list nobody pruned.
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